


The Next Best Thing

by Sixthlight



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: M/M, Spoilers for The Hanging Tree, Truth Spells, cameos from Molly and Beverley, past Peter/Beverley as per canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 02:57:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8873023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: Telepathy – in the sense of somebody reading your thoughts – is not, so far as Nightingale or I or any other Newtonian wizards I’ve met to date are aware, a real thing. 
That wasn’t much consolation right now.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Esteliel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Esteliel/gifts).



> Hi esteliel! This is a treat, inspired by the prompts in your letter, particularly "A spell goes awry and makes one of them confess their deepest, most shameful fantasies". This is....not exactly that, but that's where it started from. I hope you enjoy.

“You know,” I said, “telepathy still might not be possible but this is basically the next best thing, isn’t it?”

“I can’t believe you’re thinking about the theoretical possibility of telepathy when this is happening to us, or actually I _can_ , but I do wish you wouldn’t,” said Nightingale, and looked even more like he was sincerely regretting his entire existence.

“I think you actually like it when I have scientific theories, you just don’t appreciate my timing.”

 “Of course I do, that’s not at all the point,” Nightingale said, and promptly covered his face with his hand. Like that was going to help.

“Hah, I _knew_ it, you spend way too much time hanging around with scientists to be half as annoyed by it as you like to pretend to be,” my mouth said without stopping to consult my brain. I groaned. “Oh, fuck. I have to get out of here.”

Nightingale didn’t protest as I made a speedy exit from the atrium.

“He’s probably mad he didn’t decide to leave first,” I said out loud. “Great; now I’m narrating to myself. That doesn’t make me sound like I’m losing it _at all_.”

*

Telepathy as a concept dates to the late nineteenth century, when we’d gotten the concept of the scientific method down but were still figuring out what was a plausible hypothesis and what was just plain ridiculous. It ties into a lot of deep-down human fears and hopes; that we can know for certain what someone thinks, that all those things we think but don’t say might not be held safely between us and our conscience and our deity if we’ve got one, but laid pitilessly bare for judgement. A lot of government agencies in the mid-twentieth century spent an, in retrospect, rather embarrassing amount of time trying to verify the existence of telepathy and other forms of what they called ESP, Extra-Sensory Perception. Although compared to the cats it still wasn’t even close to the weirdest thing the CIA tried.

But the thing, is it’s not real. Oh, magic’s real, ghosts are real, things that can get into your head and pull out your fears are real – let’s not talk about the mould – but people who can read your mind, as if your thoughts were laid out on a page? Nope. No such thing. I spent three years dating a _bona fide_ goddess and all my thoughts stayed in my head where they belonged. (It might have not ended quite so awkwardly if they hadn’t, but that’s another story. We’re okay now.)

I was rapidly starting to appreciate why the non-existence of telepathy was such a good thing. To cut a long story short, Nightingale and I had been going through the collection of items we’d recovered from Martin Chorley’s stash in the basement of The Chestnut Tree – at least, the ones Christina and Reynard hadn’t nicked. We'd been putting it off for a while now, because we were too busy or just didn't want to think about the whole mess, but we'd had a quiet patch and no excuses not to.

And now, for no obvious reason, we were just saying everything we thought, like all filter between thought and verbalisation had been removed. It didn’t matter whether we wanted to say it or not; it just happened. At first I’d thought we were both just tired, and then Nightingale had mentioned possibly driving up to Oxford to store some of the books with Postmartin and I’d been totally unable to stop myself expressing my opinions about his driving in crisis situations. He’d been less than impressed. It was only when I realised neither of us was physically able to stop saying what we were thinking that I knew we had a problem.

I tried covering my mouth with my hand to muffle the swearing that realisation brought on, but it didn’t stop much.

“My thoughts exactly,” said Nightingale when I was done.

Molly had appeared with only the slightest rustle of skirts to herald her arrival; I heard the quiet hissing noise of her laughter

 “Molly, I know Peter’s expression is very amusing right now, but we’re all in rather sincere distress,” said Nightingale. “We can’t stop saying everything we’re thinking.” Molly arched an eyebrow. “Yes, really everything, which means it’s only a matter of time before someone embarrasses themselves thoroughly and most likely it will be me.”

“I think you just did,” I said.

“If that’s the worst of it I will be exceedingly grateful,” Nightingale said darkly.

*

My next move, once things had degraded further and I'd fled the atrium, was to resort to texting. For some reason, I found, the spell only worked on speech; I could type whatever I wanted, or nothing at all. I was still talking to myself, of course, but at least the only recipients of my inadvertent confessions were the contents of the teaching lab.

“I can’t believe I’m breaking the no-phones-in-the-lab rule, this is what we’ve come to and it hasn’t even been an hour,” I said as I messaged Nightingale.

_How long do you think before it wears off?_

_I have no idea,_ Nightingale replied promptly _. I think I remember a report on something like this, but it wasn’t a Newtonian spell._

_We can’t go anywhere like this._

_Should we call Dr Walid?_ I tried. “I don’t think he’d know what was going on but at least he’s heard most of the worst about both of us,” I told the microscopes. “But definitely not Jennifer Vaughan. She’d be sarcastic at us. I wouldn’t even be able to tell if it was on purpose.”

_NO_ , came the response from Nightingale, in all-caps, which he never does in his rare text messages. I wondered what he was saying out loud. _That wouldn’t be helpful._

_Do you think we can get Molly to give us dinner in our rooms?_

_Are you hoping this will just wear off?_

_Yes?_

_I don’t think we’re going to be that lucky,_ Nightingale replied. _We’re going to need to do some research. Perhaps if I take the magical library and you the mundane one, for the moment. The key thing is to identify which item it was, but we should avoid all of them until we have some ideas._

_Might as well get on with it then_ , I sent back, and then – cautiously – headed for the back entrance to the mundane library.

“I know that,” I told a sink as I went. “Of course we won’t be that lucky. I’m just trying to keep a positive attitude, or otherwise I’m going to go bloody mad.”

The sink, thankfully, didn’t have anything to say about it.

*

All I found to start with was totally unhelpful – just a lot of old wizards explaining _seducere_ , which this wasn’t. I could resist _seducere_ just fine. Plus some records of Folly experiments at telepathy, also from the early twentieth century, which were as unproductive as anybody else’s had been. Nothing of Chorley’s that we’d looked at resembled any of the enchanted items I was reading about.

The next disaster happened when Beverley called me on my mobile and I answered before I’d stopped to think about it.

“Hi, Peter,” she said. “What’s up with you?”

“I’ve been hit with some sort of enchantment that means I say everything I’m thinking and worse, so has Nightingale, and it’s a total nightmare,” I said. “Which is probably not the kind of answer you were expecting to get. Uh, you?”

“Oh my _god_ ,” said Beverley. “Seriously?”

“Does it sound like the sort of thing I’d make up? Actually, no, it does sound like the sort of thing I’d make up, or hypothesise about, but I think the babbling makes it pretty obvious I’m not making it up.”

“So I can ask you anything and you’ll tell me exactly what you’re thinking?”

“You sound like you think it’s _funny_. It’s not. And I trust you and I want to keep doing that, so please don’t ask me anything. I mean anything important. If you decided now was the time to get my real opinion on something that didn’t matter that’d be fair enough, it’s what I’d do, but-”

She interrupted me. “You think I _would_?”

“I don’t really or I would have hung up already,” I said. “It’s nice to talk to someone who’s not stuck with the same problem I am. It feels like I’m walking around with our skin off. I can’t even be in the same room as anybody safely. I hate it.”

Beverley sucked in what sounded like a horrified breath.

“Yeah, you just realised what it really means, didn’t you,” I said. “I never say stuff like that out loud unless you’ve got a lot of drinks into me and maybe not then.”

“I’m going to hang up now,” she said, gently. “Look after yourself. Fix this. Let me know if I can help. Don’t let Ty find out.”

“I love you a lot,” I said, and wanted to die. “Shit; you know what I mean, you’re really important to me, and I do trust you.”

“Bye, Peter,” she said, and hung up.

“Thank _God_ ,” I said out loud, and texted her, because I needed to do that. Of course I said what I was texting while I was typing it.

_Thanks. Sorry. This sucks._

_That was a bit weird but nothing to be sorry for_ , she replied. _Go do your research or whatever._

_Did you have something you needed to talk to me about?_ She wouldn’t usually have called me in the mid-afternoon of a workday, otherwise.

_Nothing that can’t wait. Get this fixed, alright?_

I put my head in my hands.

“Telling your ex-girlfriend how much you love her, that’s got to be as uncomfortable as this gets, right?” I asked the air. “Except, God, now I’m imagining what I might say to Ty – or someone like Seawoll – or I’d call Stephanopoulos the scariest lesbian in the Met to her face – actually Stephanopoulos would probably think that was a little bit funny but she’d yell at me anyway just for show. Christ. _Christ_.”

 I decided I’d earned a break from looking things up, went out to the coach house, and dusted off my sadly rarely-used gaming console and put on a first-person shooter. Loudly. That way it drowned out my narration to myself; my throat was starting to hurt. Most of the time I had to concentrate too hard for real thought.

It was great.

Molly brought me my dinner out there, on a tray, which she _never_ does; Nightingale must have persuaded her it was a necessity.

“Wow,” I said. “Thanks. You never do this; I guess you realise how creeped out we all are by this. Or you just don’t want to listen to us babble awkwardly over dinner. This smells _amazing_. I’m so glad we got you to start making proper food. Sometimes I imagine Nightingale having been here for eighty years eating old boarding school English cooking and I –”

I slapped a hand over my mouth, but it was too late; Molly slammed the door behind her. I’m surprised she didn’t throw anything at me. Good thing I’d gotten a hold on the cutlery first. I’ve seen Molly with a knife and it’s not something I want to see aimed at me.

“Shit,” I said, once I’d got all the rest of that out, between my fingers. “Shit, shit, _shit_ , it can get worse.”

I ate, but I felt guilty with every bite.

Nightingale texted me while I was out there: _still going?_

_Yes,_ I sent back, _bad as ever. Molly wants to stab me, I think._

_You criticised her cooking, didn’t you._

_How did you guess?_

_We’re going to be lucky if we’re both not in charge of our own catering for the next month._

I laughed. “Well, at least I’m not the only one. I knew he didn’t like it that much; he was always sneaking out to restaurants. Poor bugger.”

I stayed out there so long I fell asleep, checking the rest of the records on Chorley in HOLMES in case that shook anything loose – maybe I could figure out where he’d got some of those items, how they might have been enchanted. When I woke up my watch told me it was two am. I crept back into the Folly hoping I could make it safely in my room, but of course I ran straight into Nightingale.

“You haven’t been to bed either, you’re still dressed,” I said when I saw him.  

“I thought you might be avoiding coming back into the main building,” said Nightingale. “It would have been a good plan.”

“I can’t stop feeling like if we don’t avoid each other we’re going to say something we can’t take back,” I said.

“We will,” said Nightingale almost at once. “Quite aside from your commentary on my driving.”

“I already did to Molly,” I confessed, unable not to. “Like I told you. And I think you did too, even if you didn’t say it in that many words. But that’s the problem isn’t it – when you work with someone _and_ you live with them there’s all these little things you never say because you know it’d hurt or upset them, and it’s not important enough for that, and we can’t not say those things, all those comforting little lies and omissions. Telling the truth in all things is such _bullshit_.”

“Yes,” said Nightingale. “I always thought what one did was more important than what one said, but words are doing things too, aren’t they. You always remind me of that.”

“You know that’s one of the main reasons you’re a decent human being,” I said. “By all rights you shouldn’t be. Lesley thought I wasn’t nearly suspicious enough of you, back when, and I wondered if she had a point, and then it turned out it was Lesley I should have been worried about.”

“I don’t think I’m nearly as decent as you think,” Nightingale said. “I worry I’m going to fall off that pedestal of yours any time, and I don’t think you could take that again.”

I needed to leave, I really did, but my legs felt too heavy. “You’re not on a pedestal,” I heard myself saying. “You screw up just as much as the rest of us, you’ve just had more time to practice doing it without being noticed. The point is that you try. That’s what matters.”

“You give me reasons to keep trying,” he said.

I was silent. I couldn’t think of anything – didn’t have anything to say.

“I hadn’t considered rendering each other speechless as a way to solve this,” said Nightingale, a little incredulously. He ran a hand through his hair. I was suddenly aware of the hour, of us both a bit ragged around the edges, and as soon as I was I was saying “I really like seeing you like this, when you’re a little bit more normal.”

It was his turn to be lost for words.

“So that’s what not knowing what to say looks like from the outside,” I said, faintly, at his expression. “Oh, _God_.”

I’m not saying we ran away, but: we ran away.

*

I woke up and said “There was something godawful going on, what was it – oh, it was _this_ , it’s still happening,” which was how I knew the spell, or whatever it was, was still working.

“I wonder if it was just some kind of booby-trap,” I said. “Nah, that doesn’t sound right. The potential for embarrassment’s pretty high, but Chorley was never nearly that subtle. I'd believe it was Lesley, but I don't think she ever got near any of this stuff.”

Since it was still going, there was something I had to do, first off. I went to the kitchen. There was no sign that breakfast was in the offing. I said as much, and Molly just glared at me.

“You know I can’t not say what I’m thinking right now,” I said. “That doesn’t mean it’s true. It just means I’m thinking it. And it’s true I’ve never been a fan of traditional English institutional cooking but you’re a really great cook and I don’t know what we’d do without you, I bet Nightingale probably isn’t very good at household chores. Based on what I saw with my mum I don’t even know how you keep this whole place like you do by yourself. Maybe it is magic.”

I had to stop to take a breath. Molly’s expression had softened very slightly.

“Okay, you scare me sometimes – wait, that’s not helpful – the point is I scare myself sometimes,” I said. “Bollocks. I’m going to go before I say anything else.”

Molly said nothing, of course, because it was Molly – why couldn’t this thing have happened to _her –_ but she made a really good vindaloo for dinner later that day, so I think we were okay.

*

We needed to start exchanging information on what we were finding, or not finding – since whatever-it-was was still going strong – so I came up with another solution: noise-cancelling headphones. I had one set of proper headphones and one of earbuds. The downside was that they used microprocessors, so if either of us did any magic all bets were off. Instead of texting, we wrote notes.

_I’ve found a few suggestions, but nothing resembling a solution,_ wrote Nightingale in his square, slightly messy script. _Have a look where I’ve bookmarked._

“You know, your handwriting would be better if you had to take as many statements as I have,” I said, but he couldn’t hear me. I wrote _See these records on some seventeenth-century goes at ~~Ver~~ a truth spell _ instead. When I glanced up his lips were moving but I deliberately looked away before I could put that and the faint sound together.

My current bet on the source of our predicament was something that had seemed very incongruous at the time we’d found it in the collection; a small King James Bible. It’s hard to enchant paper, but this had metal filigree inlaid into the cover, and swearing on the Bible is a good old tradition. But I wasn’t ready to suggest it until I had a better idea of the _kind_ of spell that might have been used on it – and by whom.

We kept going. And talking.

*

I realised the batteries in my headphones had died when I heard Nightingale speak.

Sound-proof headphones aren’t perfect, of course, and I’d put some music on mine while we paged through more books and old reports. Nightingale was probably listening to podcasts. Radio was the medium he’d grown up with, and he’d taken to the whole concept of being able to listen to shows whenever you liked with ferocious speed. Originally I’d had to download them for him – which had been great as a bargaining chip, because he was too good a person to _order_ me to sort out his recreational listening for him – but after eight or nine years or however long it’d been he just used an app on his phone like everybody else. It made me so proud.  

Of course, I didn’t think all this. I was saying it out loud as I read, secure in the knowledge that I could barely hear myself and Nightingale _definitely_ couldn’t hear me. As I said. Out loud. My throat was really hurting now.

“It’s all the talking,” I said. “I might go and get a glass of water. Fuck, this is ridiculous. And if it keeps on we _will_ need to talk to Dr Walid – he’ll need to treat us for throat damage. Which sounds like a joke, but it’s not funny.”

I went quiet as I digested another line of Latin, and verbally cursed the wizards of the nineteenth century for their devotion to keeping magic from the proletariat through linguistic conclusion. Then, over the music, I heard Nightingale say very clearly “You need a haircut.”

I jerked my head up, startled. He’d looked back down at the report he was currently going through.

“Who asked you?” I asked.

He didn’t hear me, and he’d looked down again so he didn’t see what I did next. I pulled my earbuds out and looked at the battery pack. “Shit. Dead batteries; the sound is still coming through but it’s not enough to drown you out.”

“Oh, god, that’s exactly the sort of thing I was worried about saying,” Nightingale went on. “Lucky we’ve got these sound-stopping earmuff things. They do work surprisingly well. I love looking at you when you’re concentrating on things; it makes me realise how much attention you’ve _got_ in you, it’s just spread out over a dozen things most of the time. I wonder what it’d be like if I had your full attention. No, good _God,_ I can’t even let myself think anything like that or -”

I lunged across the table and got a hand across his mouth. He looked up at me, eyes wide, but didn’t stop me.

“So that’s what it takes to sneak up on you, noise-cancelling headphones,” I said. “My headphone batteries just died; I can hear you even over my music. You’re wondering – it was when you said I needed a haircut, that’s when I noticed.”

“I knew this was going to happen,” said Nightingale against my palm. He pulled his own headphones off, slowly.

“It feels really good when you do that,” I said.

“What?”

“Talk against my hand, _shit_.” Nightingale pulled my hand away from his mouth, and I snatched it back. I retreated to my side of the table, the safe one, all the while my mouth was spilling my thoughts. “Don’t touch me, it makes me think about other things I really don’t want to talk about and I can’t stop myself, it’s worse than not having self-control, I have it and it doesn’t make any difference.”

“You can’t possibly need self-control around me,” said Nightingale, fumbling as if to put the headphones back on.

“Not on a regular basis, but this isn’t regular.”

“Good for you,” said Nightingale. “I think all sorts of things about you I’d never in a million years consider saying out loud.”

“I think it’s a sign of where we are that I’m really hoping that’s just some of the nineteenth-century language I’ve managed to train out of you,” I said. “But it isn’t, is it. I wonder what it is.”

“Please _go_ ,” Nightingale managed, very still but not at all calm.

I tried; at least I stood up and backed away, but I wasn’t tracking well and only made it as far as the nearest bookshelf. When my back hit it I stopped.

“The trouble is now I’m never going to stop wondering,” I said.

“Your imagination is much better than mine, so that can’t be good,” said Nightingale. He was staring resolutely to one side of me. His ears had started to go red.  

“I dunno,” I said. “I haven’t had sex with a guy since I was sixteen, if you can call that sex, so yours is probably a lot more accurate.”

I wasn’t doing any better on the blushing front, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“It probably is,” said Nightingale, very low. We were both starting to lose our voices.

 “If this keeps up we’re actually going to damage our vocal chords,” I said. “And now I _know_ I’m too curious for my own damn good, or anybody else’s.”

“You’re allowed to be as curious as you like, in the privacy of your own head.” Nightingale smiled wryly.

“We don’t have the privacy of our own heads right now, we have the privacy of each others’. For what that’s worth.” I slid slowly down against the shelves, until I was sitting on the floor. Nightingale just looked at me, biting into his lip like he might draw blood, but he didn’t say anything.

“Don’t bite your lip,” I said. “It’s not helping with the wondering problem.”

“You sitting down there isn’t helping,” Nightingale shot back.

“Oh, you think about me on my knees a lot?” I tried to make it come out like a joke, but it came out eager. I looked at the ceiling. It was all I could do. “I’m not even _on_ my knees. I don’t know why I said that.”

“I think about _getting_ on my knees for you a lot,” Nightingale said, so quietly it was almost inaudible at this distance.

“Not quiet enough,” I said. “Jesus Christ, I’m never going to be able to get that image out of my head now.”

“Sorry, sorry, _sorry_ ,” Nightingale said, desperately, a thing I think he would have said no matter what spell he was under. But it wasn’t really helpful anyway.

“I meant that in the sense it’s going to occur to me when I’m wanking off whether I want it to or not,” my treacherous mouth informed him. “In the sense that it’s a _really nice_ mental image.”

There was a stunned silence.

“I never noticed the plasterwork in here before,” I said. “Is that from the eighteen-fifties? Molly must have a hell of a time dusting it.”

“It’s amazing that’s how your brain actually works,” said Nightingale. His voice dropped. “And you engaging in self-abuse, that’s an image _I’m_ not going to be getting out of _my_ head, good _Lord_.”

“I’m trying really hard to think of some other innocuous architectural observations and I can’t think of any,” I said.

“I _wish_ I had the sort of brain that let me have architectural observations at times like these. Instead I’m trying not to think about anything even more incriminating.”

“I usually try to forget about it, but I had this dream about you once.” It was coming back now, full-colour, the way I usually didn’t let it, because you can’t. “You and the Ferrari, how stupid is that, it’d be so uncomfortable in real life, but in the dream I kiss you and nothing gets in the way, and there’s enough room for you to climb on top of me, and then before it got any further I woke up so hard I couldn’t help wanking off. Then I found excuses to not have to see you the rest of the day. I knew if I did I was going to keep thinking about it.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Nightingale a bit blankly, and then, as if considering, “although I can’t recommend engaging in that sort of activity in a car if you have better options. I’d much rather have you in a bed. I think I could get you to pay attention to one thing for a good long while. _Especially_ if that thing was me riding you.”

“You know,” I said, not really processing so much as just enjoying that image, “Normally I don’t even like talking dirty. It always ends up better in theory than practice. But it’s really working for me right now.” I was so hard it was making me dizzy. “Fuck, this is like being sixteen again. That was bad enough the first time.”

“Wasn’t it,” said Nightingale. “I did always like talking, and _you_ talking is another thing again.” He was blushing anyway, of course, but now there was a faint sheen of sweat on his brow, too.

“I think you could change my mind about it,” I admitted. “I think it’d be fun finding out.”

“I don’t want to change your mind about anything, I just want to get you to where you can’t think straight, or about – plaster-moulding, or anything like that.”

“Okay,” I said. “Enough. I think if this keeps going somebody is going to come in their trousers and that would just be embarrassing.” Getting up again wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, but I managed it, and Nightingale was saying “Then what exactly -” as I pulled his chair out a bit – he was in as much of a state as I was.

“Either we’re going to bite our tongues or this is going to work,” I said, and straddled his lap and kissed him. Considering what we’d just been talking about I shouldn’t have felt shy about it, but that’s first kisses for you.

Nobody bit anybody’s tongue. 

It turned out to be a really fantastic way to avoid talking, too. Even when we paused for breath, we didn’t have a lot of coherent thoughts left; or I didn’t, anyway. Nightingale was murmuring into my shoulder as he fumbled with my belt, too low to really make out. I moved back slightly so I could do the same for him.

“I don’t think this is going to get very complicated,” I said. “You’ve got my full attention now, anyway, I hope you’re enjoying it – _fuck_.”

I lost coherency entirely when Nightingale pulled me out of my trousers, and he grinned.

“Now I’m going to remember that every time you grin like that,” I said, and kissed him by way of complaint. I left off dealing with his belt to undo his tie and the top couple of buttons of his shirt; I wanted to see him in as much disarray as I felt. I leant back to observe the effect.

“Peter,” he said, and I buried most of what tried to spill out in mouthing at the side of his neck. This got him uncoordinated enough for me to successfully get _his_ trousers open, and then he let me take over. I didn’t try to be fancy – I wasn’t confident enough for that, anyway. I just stroked us both together, and even that was good enough that not much was coming out of my mouth – or Nightingale’s – except _yes_ and _like that_ and _please_ and _oh god._

“ _Peter,_ ” said Nightingale, finally, and that was it, I whited out, with just enough self-preservation left to cup my hand so we didn’t ruin our clothes. When I opened my eyes, Nightingale was tensed, biting his lip again as he came.

“I wish I’d managed to keep my eyes open to see all of that,” I said, and he jerked. “That looked like it hurt, but I don’t think it did.”

“Definitely not,” Nightingale managed, panting.

“Years and years,” I said, half-dreamily.

“What?”

“How long I’m going to be remembering this.”

“Me too,” said Nightingale. I looked around for something to clean up with, and of course Nightingale produced a handkerchief.

“I always seem to be borrowing them off you,” I said. “You’d think I’d have learned to carry one.  Although this is still better than the last time.”

“Maybe you should keep that one,” Nightingale suggested.

“I’ve tried,” I said. “I think Molly keeps putting them back in your room. They never stay in mine even if I wash them myself.”

“Well, now I know what to get you for Christmas,” he said, as I got up and we dealt with our clothes.

I laughed. “This is almost a normal conversation, how fucked up is that?”

“I wouldn’t call it ‘fucked up’ at all,” said Nightingale, putting audible quotes in there. “I think we _are_ quite truthful with each other most of the time. More than I realised, perhaps.”

“Yeah, me too. But it’s not bad. And you don’t think so either, which is good. It’d be depressing if we thought differently on that.”

“I like that we think differently, though,” said Nightingale. “It tends to work together.”

“I like you,” I said, unable not to.

Nightingale drew in a breath, and I kissed him again.

I didn’t want that – I didn’t want us to say anything we should be able to say on our own time, on our own terms. There’d been enough of that.

“I think I might have found something,” Nightingale said when we pulled apart.

“And you didn’t mention it earlier?”

“I was very distracted.” I got his full, glorious grin at that.

“That’s my line, I think.” My phone buzzed in my pocket. “Let me check this; oh, it’s Guleed. Are you sure you’ve got it?”

“I think so – have a look.” Nightingale turned the book towards me. “What does she want?”

“My opinion on a case, but I can’t talk to her until we’ve fixed this,” I said. “Yeah, this looks like it. I knew it was the bible. I bet somebody thought they were being really clever about oath-swearing.”

“Why can’t you talk to her? She’s dealt with enough of our sort of problems to ignore whatever you say, probably. Although I’d keep it brief.”

“Because she’ll ask what I was doing before she called me in _and then I’ll tell her_ ,” I said. “I’d rather owe Lady Ty another unspecified favour.”

“I’d rather apologise to Alexander Seawoll for something I wasn’t responsible for,” said Nightingale.

“Well, that’s an interesting insight into how you think,” I said. He looked put out. “Shall we give this a go?”

“I’ll do it first,” Nightingale said.

“What, you don’t trust me to get it right? No – I didn’t mean that literally.”

“I want to free you from it first,” he said, then looked away.

“So this hasn’t got any easier,” I said. “Thank you.”

It wasn’t a long spell, but Nightingale didn’t hurry through it. I felt a sharp sting at the end, like needles all over my skin.

I thought, _that hurt_ , and _I wonder if it worked_ , and _I didn’t realise post-coital was going to be such a good look on him,_ and I didn’t say anything.

“It worked?” Nightingale asked.

“Yeah,” I said, slowly. “Yeah, it did.”

“It looked like it wasn’t terrible comfortable.”

“Oh, it was fine,” I said. “Let’s get you fixed.” 

The soothing little lies we tell each other. I don’t know what we’d be without them.

I returned the favour, pronouncing the Latin of the _formae_ carefully as I shaped it; luckily they were all ones I knew well, even if the spell in its entirety was new, and besides I’d felt Nightingale cast it, and by now that was three-quarters of the way to being able to replicate something. I saw it hit him, and then he closed his eyes, relieved. We stood there a moment basking in the silence of our own thoughts, and nobody else’s.

“You’d better give Sahra that call back,” he said.

“I’d better,” I said. “You probably want some peace and quiet.”

“I’ve a report to write up, unfortunately.” He gestured at the table we’d been using. “And then an item to put into storage – with strict instructions as to how it’s to be used, or rather, not used.”

“A report, huh?”

“Just the important things.” His gaze flicked to my still-unbuttoned collar. I was going to need to straighten up before I left the Folly, if Guleed needed me somewhere. He didn’t say that, though, because now he didn’t have to.

“Oh, _good_ ,” I said. His mouth quirked. I wasn’t sure exactly what he was thinking, and if I wanted to know, I’d have to ask. I wasn’t going to, but when he saw me looking back, he didn’t look away.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite, even now. What are you thinking?”

Nightingale’s smile broadened into a grin. “Well,” he said. “Maybe I’ll tell you later.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] The Next Best Thing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13101576) by [knight_tracer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/knight_tracer/pseuds/knight_tracer)




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